I'm actually fine with people who would prefer to play on a console instead of a PC. Other than bad PC ports of a game originally released on a console it doesn't really affect me. But this stuck out to me as needlessly myopic:
The best games of the last few years haven't been on PC, and probably never will be.
Where is the console version of Oxygen Not Included, or Factorio, or Satisfactory, or Dota 2? Or any of the Total War games? Rimworld?
Don't pretend that just because consoles get exclusives, they get all the best games. It really depends on what you're into. And something to keep in mind is that PCs could handle any of the listed games without requiring any hardware or peripheral changes apart from having an XBOX controller. Some of the games in my list, on the other hand, would be horrible experiences without a mouse and keyboard. Out of all of them, Satisfactory is the only one that even makes sense to try playing with a console controller.
Console games use exclusivity to lock people into their platform to boost sales of the console itself. Not because the platform is inherently a better way to experience the game. PC games are usually only ever exclusive because the experience would be lackluster on a console.
The exception to the above is the Nintendo Wii/Switch systems. Their peripherals wouldn't make as much sense being tied to a PC (and in some cases don't exist for the PC), and many of their exclusive games are intimately tied to their controller type.
For me, there just aren't enough games on consoles for me to justify either having multiple options or switching. Others will choose differently, and that's fine. PC is not the obvious gaming choice for everyone, but there are some aspects it's just inherently better at.
Well, the only reason it's a question you can't wrap your mind around is because it's a question that has stopped having an answer beyond "nothing." Sight is the sensation you get when your brain interprets photons hitting your retina. In a singularity, light cannot escape to hit your retinas (ignoring the fact that your retinas can't exist there either), so how could you possibly see anything?
It's kind of like asking, "what would a bunch of astronauts clapping sound like to another astronaut in space?" The medium for experiencing the sensation has failed, so the question doesn't even make sense.
The outright destruction of PC gaming... As an original nerd from the 90's, the masses getting internet has just shown us how stupid the human race is from every class and every walk of life.
On a more serious note than my other reply to this, I think you have some rose colored glasses on when looking back to PC gaming in the 90s. I remember it too. You had to go to a physical store and read the packaging to figure out if a game looked interesting. Corporate hype and professional reviews were as biased and unreliable as ever, if not worse then. No user recommendations other than your friends (who were not always reliable indicators). No "let's play" videos letting you see what playing the game is really like. No large central hub for finding all the info you actually wanted on the vast majority of new/upcoming/popular games. I've never bought and played games as bad as the ones I experienced in the 90s. I've also never played as many games that capture my sense of wonder and fun than I have since Steam broke down many of the barriers to entry for the PC gaming market.
the masses falling on their own sword
I'm not trying to be mean, but I don't think you know what that idiom means... The context you used it in makes no sense at all. How could the masses take responsibility for something that has gone wrong and resign in relation to PC gaming?
and falling for the mmo scam, drm and steam... Everything PC nerds in the 90's were worried about came true
The worry about Steam was that because you don't own the game, they could arbitrarily decide to take away your access to everything you "bought" at any time for motives related to profit. That hasn't happened. DRM is still a problem in that a game with DRM removed by pirates is often superior to the published game with DRM, but that hasn't changed since the 90s. And not every developer uses DRM or goes crazy with it, same as in the 90s. I'm not sure what you mean about the "MMO scam". MMOs seem to be suffering from a general malaise and dearth of original and engaging content/concepts in the last decade based on my experience. They seem to have hit a wall, if not a decline in popularity.
You are right, though, that the internet isn't the root cause of any of these wider societal problems we've seen. It just started to reflect what the wider world already was as everyone got access to it.
But they're growing frustrated over just how many options they have.
No, what these people are complaining about is that nobody has been able to deliver on a reasonably priced one- or two-stop a la carte experience for viewing content they care about. And they're placing the blame squarely where it belongs - on subscription services basing their model on producing "you can only find this show on this service" content to try to lock in their piece of the pie.
I don't have to subscribe to a video game service if I want to play the newest video game. I can just buy whatever game interests me. I don't have to subscribe to a musical venue service if I want to go to the newest concert. I can just buy a ticket to the concert that interests me. I don't have to subscribe to a movie ticket service if I want to go to the newest movie. I can just buy a ticket for whatever movie interests me.
What is so special about TV shows that intrinsically requires a subscription to a service offering many different shows when all I wanted was to follow the newest episodes of one or a few?
Keep in mind that after having said all that, streaming is still an improvement over cable.
I think a more accurate headline would have been "Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy Theories Remain Popular and Lucrative - Amazon Marketplace Reflects This". And, for that matter, it's not limited to anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. Societies have always had problems with people who are all too willing to believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence to the contrary, and others willing to exploit those people for money.
When your mirror shows you something that upsets you, the correct solution is not to try to bend the mirror.
That makes sense. Healthy workers are generally more productive. After seeing the way you phrased that, I realize I may have misinterpreted your earlier comment. Sorry about that.
I would say the goal should be healthiness and fitness for work, which is closely related to hapiness.
I (and I suspect others as well) have a fundamental disagreement with this argument. My happiness in life is, at best, tenuously related to my work. I have a job that pays quite well, has an acceptable level of stress to me, and whose activities I find rewarding and engaging. Despite all this, the happiest times in my life are, without question, not related to my work. They're spending time with my wife, my family, and my friends. Or pursuing my hobbies. Or traveling. Or exploring new interests. I work where I do, doing what I do because it is the optimal way the society I exist in will allow me to enjoy those things the way I want to. I am at peace with how this has worked out for me, but I am not willing to concede that the situation cannot be improved for both myself and society at the same time.
I accept that the ability to perform work is what you believe will end up bringing people happiness. And, for you, maybe that is indeed true. Maybe for you work is intrinsically rewarding and a goal in and of itself. For me, it is not.
At this point the only way we'll get a credible third party is if there's sufficient schism within one of the major parties that it splits in two
I'm digressing a bit from the original topic, but an interesting side note here is that US history has shown that when one of its two major political parties has a split, things quickly re-form into two parties again with the members and platforms having shuffled. Here's how it generally goes:
Party A opposes the widget tax. Party B supports the widget tax. Party B has intense internal disagreement on how the funds from the widget tax should be appropriated. Enough people within party B disagree so strongly that they break off and form party C before the next election.
Result: Party C doesn't get enough votes to disrupt either party B or party A. Their members begin to desert back to party B or realign as party A because of their differences. Party C either becomes too small to matter or disappears. - OR - Party C becomes bigger than party B. Party B experiences defections to party A because of disagreements with party C and defections to party C to keep party A from gaining too much power. Party B either becomes too small to matter or disappears.
Occasionally there are a few elections in a row where there are more than two major parties with political power, but it's so rare in US history. The "us vs them" political mentality is so deeply entrenched in the collective psyche of the US that a situation with more than two major parties is inherently unstable.
There are people who have abused sunlight as an renewable energy source in the same way oil has been abused to the detriment of society.
Ahh yes. Who could forget the great solar panel spill of '04? Or the constant solar smog exuding from the solar plants every day? Or the ongoing war in Sunstania. They said it was for peacekeeping purposes. I'm convinced they just want to get their hands on all that sweet, sweet sunlight.
Yeah, but that kind of nihilistic argument can be used against aesthetics in general. I mean, if nothing matters anyway why bother making or preserving anything beautiful for our children?
My point was that if it's acceptable and good to preserve occurrences of beauty in nature then it's not ok to just bend the timeline longer and say "look, if I go massively far enough into the future it's going to go away so it's fine to despoil it now." And if it's not acceptable and good to preserve occurrences of beauty in nature then it doesn't matter whether they're decaying or not.
It also completely removes any inhibitions to mine them for valuable resources.
Not really. That's a strange definition of "soon". The 50-100 million years it's expected to take for them to disappear is functionally equivalent to "forever" when compared to human life spans or human civilization (or even the human species). If we were a space faring species with the ability to mine Saturn's rings to the extent that we could cause them to disappear within the span of several generations, the correct response is not automatically "well, they are technically disappearing anyway - it's fine."
It's flawed. Deeply flawed. But I don't have a more realistically workable idea and I still use it fairly often when I want to know a bit more on a general topic.
I tend to think of Wikipedia a bit like Churchill's paraphrased Democracy quote: it's the worst idea of its kind except for all those other forms that have been tried.
Blizzard was a part of the Vivendi games group since 1998 according to their wikipedia page. According to that same page, Activision Blizzard was formed by the merger of Vivendi and Activision in July, 2008.
Wrath of the Lich King (the last Blizzard game or expansion to have a majority of old-time fans agree was at least "good" by long-time Blizzard standards) came out in November, 2008.
I have no other proof or evidence, but just from the timing of major events and quality of products I get the feeling there was a major change in decisions and (more likely) who made the decisions before and after that merger. I think the people who poured their souls into making the games we most remember and love are long gone, and there is no going back to the Blizzard we once loved with fervent passion.
I can see what you're getting at. In some cases, when a user navigates through a web page that is built and displayed dynamically through javascript without reloading its parent page, a user might expect that hitting "back" would take them to the previous frame of whatever content they last navigated through. They could become annoyed when "back" actually takes them wherever they were before arriving at the site initially and losing all their progress.
But I don't agree that selectively modifying "back" button functionality is a good solution to the problem. Either browsers should agree that "back" means go back to the previously viewed content and allow pages to easily add actions taken on the page to the browser history or "back" should mean "always load the last parent page I went to." Right now it means the latter. I wouldn't be opposed to the former, but until that becomes a standard I feel the onus is on the developer to expect the "back" button to always have the same effect and not try to modify around it.
I also understand that the browser allows you to modify how things like the back button work. I just personally wouldn't build important functionality in my site around something the browser normally controls, and wouldn't be terribly surprised if it stopped working the way I'd originally intended after a browser update.
Well, to make the analogy accurate it's more like saying, "Hey, I noticed that out of the millions of halls that lead to your house, you seem to have blocked off the set of halls I usually use to get there. So I went down one of the other halls."
The building's owner did not wish to restrict entry. The building's owner wished to bar entry to a very specific entrant but otherwise remain public.
Microsoft has to learn how to make software like everyone else. You need to keep compatibility with the big fish, and not just do your own thing, and thinking everyone will switch to your method.
So much this. All the other browsers had to deal with these same changes to Google sites too. Why was it so much more painful to Microsoft? Well, I thought this piece from the article was pretty telling:
What's particularly interesting about this is that whether Google did this intentionally or not, Microsoft fell into a trap that it set for itself. When Bakita says, "we couldn't keep up", and goes on to say that the issue is fixed in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, that's actually because Microsoft set a path for itself where it could only add new features to Edge with feature updates to Windows 10. That limits the company to twice per year.
I'm sorry, but this browser was doomed as soon as it arrived due to fundamental flaws in its design. Blaming Google is just focusing on the convenient obvious symptom instead of addressing the root problem.
To be fair, that's exactly the kind of mistake I'd expect to see an intern make.
Even if that were the concern, this technology doesn't help that problem at all. This is facial recognition identifying known threats to the performer in the crowd. The two mass killings at concerts in the last 5 years that come to my mind are the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 and the Paris attacks in 2015. Neither of those were perpetuated by stalkers. Nether of those were perpetuated by members of the concert-going crowd. None of the attackers in either case were in a place where facial recognition of the crowd would have either seen them or even identified them as a threat. The idea that using this technology makes the concert-goers any safer is ludicrous.
That said, a public figure using facial recognition on audiences for their security detail to keep track of known potential threats does not strike me as a bad idea. It's just not nearly as salacious a story and wouldn't garner nearly as much attention.
tl;dr - This specific usage of facial recognition technology isn't terribly controversial. The conclusions drawn by the article are, but that was probably the point.
... That's not quite how expertise works in applied sciences. If someone tells you that plugging a USB stick into a computer that is behind a firewall is safe, you might have heard that it's unsafe, but since it's a testable action you can *know* it's not safe. Somewhere down the line, someone (a lot of people, usually) actually did the thing they purport to have expertise on. For complex topics you would defer to other experts in the field, but for basic wide-ranging policies you should really be utilizing broad knowledge of the subject instead of specifics.
Plus, having three people advise you isn't much better than one. If two are frauds and one is competent you still get bad advice without having any idea what good advice would even sound like. That's sometimes acceptable for concerns tertiary to your goals, but not for advice on setting and achieving the primary goals themselves.
You're right. Having an "expert" is much worse than having an expert. Then again, with absolutely no background knowledge, how does he know whether those he delegates to are "experts" or experts?
I mean, call me crazy, but even if you're not an expert shouldn't you at least have a fundamental understanding of how the organization you are in charge of affects the world day to day?
Is it because these people *aren't* saving enough for retirement or is it because they *can't* save enough to retire? The difference lies in whether one assumes most of these people are finding meaning and satisfaction in their work or whether they are stuck in a cycle they hate and have no means to change or affect. The appropriate solution to deal with this shift very much depends on which of the two you think is happening.
Ironically, I feel like you can thank the phone plan carriers for this. There haven't been huge advantages to getting a new phone every year or two for a long, long time. But people did it because, as the summary states, the cost was subsidized by the carriers as bait to get people to switch networks and sign 2 year contracts. Since they stopped doing that and customers started seeing the high price tag attached to those phones they have been deciding that while the $100-$200 upgrade to the newest phone was something they could live with, $500 (or much more, depending on how new a model you want) is not.
Honestly, I feel like the rapid upgrade cycle we saw for several years was the strange behavior and what we're seeing now is just a return to normalcy.
Ok, I've seen this same argument too many times to keep quiet anymore. "Nobody is forcing you to work there" is a terrible litmus test for worker exploitation! There is truly no employer abuse that cannot be dismissed by saying "well, nobody is forcing you to work there."
Being harassed at work? Nobody is forcing you to work there. Mandatory overtime without pay? Nobody is forcing you to work there. Forced to promote the employer on your personal social media account or you're blacklisted? Nobody is forcing you to work there. Constantly repeated workplace accidents due to safety hazards employer refuses to address? Nobody is forcing you to work there. Required to publicly support your employer's political stance? Nobody is forcing you to work there.
You can't draw the line at literal slave labor and say anything less than that is perfectly fine!
Should the rules for who can park in a business' parking lot be the same as the rules for all the roads that can be used to get to that business? Why not? Shouldn't we be using the same rules wherever cars can go?
Slashdot Mirror
Always amusing to see a company both figuratively and literally covering their asses at the same time.
I'm actually fine with people who would prefer to play on a console instead of a PC. Other than bad PC ports of a game originally released on a console it doesn't really affect me. But this stuck out to me as needlessly myopic:
The best games of the last few years haven't been on PC, and probably never will be.
Where is the console version of Oxygen Not Included, or Factorio, or Satisfactory, or Dota 2? Or any of the Total War games? Rimworld?
Don't pretend that just because consoles get exclusives, they get all the best games. It really depends on what you're into. And something to keep in mind is that PCs could handle any of the listed games without requiring any hardware or peripheral changes apart from having an XBOX controller. Some of the games in my list, on the other hand, would be horrible experiences without a mouse and keyboard. Out of all of them, Satisfactory is the only one that even makes sense to try playing with a console controller.
Console games use exclusivity to lock people into their platform to boost sales of the console itself. Not because the platform is inherently a better way to experience the game. PC games are usually only ever exclusive because the experience would be lackluster on a console.
The exception to the above is the Nintendo Wii/Switch systems. Their peripherals wouldn't make as much sense being tied to a PC (and in some cases don't exist for the PC), and many of their exclusive games are intimately tied to their controller type.
For me, there just aren't enough games on consoles for me to justify either having multiple options or switching. Others will choose differently, and that's fine. PC is not the obvious gaming choice for everyone, but there are some aspects it's just inherently better at.
Well, the only reason it's a question you can't wrap your mind around is because it's a question that has stopped having an answer beyond "nothing." Sight is the sensation you get when your brain interprets photons hitting your retina. In a singularity, light cannot escape to hit your retinas (ignoring the fact that your retinas can't exist there either), so how could you possibly see anything?
It's kind of like asking, "what would a bunch of astronauts clapping sound like to another astronaut in space?" The medium for experiencing the sensation has failed, so the question doesn't even make sense.
The outright destruction of PC gaming ... As an original nerd from the 90's, the masses getting internet has just shown us how stupid the human race is from every class and every walk of life.
On a more serious note than my other reply to this, I think you have some rose colored glasses on when looking back to PC gaming in the 90s. I remember it too. You had to go to a physical store and read the packaging to figure out if a game looked interesting. Corporate hype and professional reviews were as biased and unreliable as ever, if not worse then. No user recommendations other than your friends (who were not always reliable indicators). No "let's play" videos letting you see what playing the game is really like. No large central hub for finding all the info you actually wanted on the vast majority of new/upcoming/popular games. I've never bought and played games as bad as the ones I experienced in the 90s. I've also never played as many games that capture my sense of wonder and fun than I have since Steam broke down many of the barriers to entry for the PC gaming market.
the masses falling on their own sword
I'm not trying to be mean, but I don't think you know what that idiom means... The context you used it in makes no sense at all. How could the masses take responsibility for something that has gone wrong and resign in relation to PC gaming?
and falling for the mmo scam, drm and steam ... Everything PC nerds in the 90's were worried about came true
The worry about Steam was that because you don't own the game, they could arbitrarily decide to take away your access to everything you "bought" at any time for motives related to profit. That hasn't happened. DRM is still a problem in that a game with DRM removed by pirates is often superior to the published game with DRM, but that hasn't changed since the 90s. And not every developer uses DRM or goes crazy with it, same as in the 90s. I'm not sure what you mean about the "MMO scam". MMOs seem to be suffering from a general malaise and dearth of original and engaging content/concepts in the last decade based on my experience. They seem to have hit a wall, if not a decline in popularity.
You are right, though, that the internet isn't the root cause of any of these wider societal problems we've seen. It just started to reflect what the wider world already was as everyone got access to it.
... the reality is the internet has shown us the true face of the human race - everyones reality is right and it's those other guys who are incorrect.
I think you're wrong about that.
Wait... Damn it!
But they're growing frustrated over just how many options they have.
No, what these people are complaining about is that nobody has been able to deliver on a reasonably priced one- or two-stop a la carte experience for viewing content they care about. And they're placing the blame squarely where it belongs - on subscription services basing their model on producing "you can only find this show on this service" content to try to lock in their piece of the pie.
I don't have to subscribe to a video game service if I want to play the newest video game. I can just buy whatever game interests me.
I don't have to subscribe to a musical venue service if I want to go to the newest concert. I can just buy a ticket to the concert that interests me.
I don't have to subscribe to a movie ticket service if I want to go to the newest movie. I can just buy a ticket for whatever movie interests me.
What is so special about TV shows that intrinsically requires a subscription to a service offering many different shows when all I wanted was to follow the newest episodes of one or a few?
Keep in mind that after having said all that, streaming is still an improvement over cable.
I think a more accurate headline would have been "Anti-Vaccination Conspiracy Theories Remain Popular and Lucrative - Amazon Marketplace Reflects This". And, for that matter, it's not limited to anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. Societies have always had problems with people who are all too willing to believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence to the contrary, and others willing to exploit those people for money.
When your mirror shows you something that upsets you, the correct solution is not to try to bend the mirror.
That makes sense. Healthy workers are generally more productive. After seeing the way you phrased that, I realize I may have misinterpreted your earlier comment. Sorry about that.
I would say the goal should be healthiness and fitness for work, which is closely related to hapiness.
I (and I suspect others as well) have a fundamental disagreement with this argument. My happiness in life is, at best, tenuously related to my work. I have a job that pays quite well, has an acceptable level of stress to me, and whose activities I find rewarding and engaging. Despite all this, the happiest times in my life are, without question, not related to my work. They're spending time with my wife, my family, and my friends. Or pursuing my hobbies. Or traveling. Or exploring new interests. I work where I do, doing what I do because it is the optimal way the society I exist in will allow me to enjoy those things the way I want to. I am at peace with how this has worked out for me, but I am not willing to concede that the situation cannot be improved for both myself and society at the same time.
I accept that the ability to perform work is what you believe will end up bringing people happiness. And, for you, maybe that is indeed true. Maybe for you work is intrinsically rewarding and a goal in and of itself. For me, it is not.
At this point the only way we'll get a credible third party is if there's sufficient schism within one of the major parties that it splits in two
I'm digressing a bit from the original topic, but an interesting side note here is that US history has shown that when one of its two major political parties has a split, things quickly re-form into two parties again with the members and platforms having shuffled. Here's how it generally goes:
Party A opposes the widget tax.
Party B supports the widget tax.
Party B has intense internal disagreement on how the funds from the widget tax should be appropriated.
Enough people within party B disagree so strongly that they break off and form party C before the next election.
Result:
Party C doesn't get enough votes to disrupt either party B or party A. Their members begin to desert back to party B or realign as party A because of their differences. Party C either becomes too small to matter or disappears.
- OR -
Party C becomes bigger than party B. Party B experiences defections to party A because of disagreements with party C and defections to party C to keep party A from gaining too much power. Party B either becomes too small to matter or disappears.
Occasionally there are a few elections in a row where there are more than two major parties with political power, but it's so rare in US history. The "us vs them" political mentality is so deeply entrenched in the collective psyche of the US that a situation with more than two major parties is inherently unstable.
There are people who have abused sunlight as an renewable energy source in the same way oil has been abused to the detriment of society.
Ahh yes. Who could forget the great solar panel spill of '04? Or the constant solar smog exuding from the solar plants every day? Or the ongoing war in Sunstania. They said it was for peacekeeping purposes. I'm convinced they just want to get their hands on all that sweet, sweet sunlight.
Yeah, but that kind of nihilistic argument can be used against aesthetics in general. I mean, if nothing matters anyway why bother making or preserving anything beautiful for our children?
My point was that if it's acceptable and good to preserve occurrences of beauty in nature then it's not ok to just bend the timeline longer and say "look, if I go massively far enough into the future it's going to go away so it's fine to despoil it now." And if it's not acceptable and good to preserve occurrences of beauty in nature then it doesn't matter whether they're decaying or not.
It also completely removes any inhibitions to mine them for valuable resources.
Not really. That's a strange definition of "soon". The 50-100 million years it's expected to take for them to disappear is functionally equivalent to "forever" when compared to human life spans or human civilization (or even the human species). If we were a space faring species with the ability to mine Saturn's rings to the extent that we could cause them to disappear within the span of several generations, the correct response is not automatically "well, they are technically disappearing anyway - it's fine."
It's flawed. Deeply flawed. But I don't have a more realistically workable idea and I still use it fairly often when I want to know a bit more on a general topic.
I tend to think of Wikipedia a bit like Churchill's paraphrased Democracy quote: it's the worst idea of its kind except for all those other forms that have been tried.
Interesting bits of timing to note:
Blizzard was a part of the Vivendi games group since 1998 according to their wikipedia page. According to that same page, Activision Blizzard was formed by the merger of Vivendi and Activision in July, 2008.
Wrath of the Lich King (the last Blizzard game or expansion to have a majority of old-time fans agree was at least "good" by long-time Blizzard standards) came out in November, 2008.
I have no other proof or evidence, but just from the timing of major events and quality of products I get the feeling there was a major change in decisions and (more likely) who made the decisions before and after that merger. I think the people who poured their souls into making the games we most remember and love are long gone, and there is no going back to the Blizzard we once loved with fervent passion.
I can see what you're getting at. In some cases, when a user navigates through a web page that is built and displayed dynamically through javascript without reloading its parent page, a user might expect that hitting "back" would take them to the previous frame of whatever content they last navigated through. They could become annoyed when "back" actually takes them wherever they were before arriving at the site initially and losing all their progress.
But I don't agree that selectively modifying "back" button functionality is a good solution to the problem. Either browsers should agree that "back" means go back to the previously viewed content and allow pages to easily add actions taken on the page to the browser history or "back" should mean "always load the last parent page I went to." Right now it means the latter. I wouldn't be opposed to the former, but until that becomes a standard I feel the onus is on the developer to expect the "back" button to always have the same effect and not try to modify around it.
I also understand that the browser allows you to modify how things like the back button work. I just personally wouldn't build important functionality in my site around something the browser normally controls, and wouldn't be terribly surprised if it stopped working the way I'd originally intended after a browser update.
Well, to make the analogy accurate it's more like saying, "Hey, I noticed that out of the millions of halls that lead to your house, you seem to have blocked off the set of halls I usually use to get there. So I went down one of the other halls."
The building's owner did not wish to restrict entry. The building's owner wished to bar entry to a very specific entrant but otherwise remain public.
Microsoft has to learn how to make software like everyone else. You need to keep compatibility with the big fish, and not just do your own thing, and thinking everyone will switch to your method.
So much this. All the other browsers had to deal with these same changes to Google sites too. Why was it so much more painful to Microsoft? Well, I thought this piece from the article was pretty telling:
What's particularly interesting about this is that whether Google did this intentionally or not, Microsoft fell into a trap that it set for itself. When Bakita says, "we couldn't keep up", and goes on to say that the issue is fixed in the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, that's actually because Microsoft set a path for itself where it could only add new features to Edge with feature updates to Windows 10. That limits the company to twice per year.
I'm sorry, but this browser was doomed as soon as it arrived due to fundamental flaws in its design. Blaming Google is just focusing on the convenient obvious symptom instead of addressing the root problem.
To be fair, that's exactly the kind of mistake I'd expect to see an intern make.
Even if that were the concern, this technology doesn't help that problem at all. This is facial recognition identifying known threats to the performer in the crowd. The two mass killings at concerts in the last 5 years that come to my mind are the Las Vegas shooting in 2017 and the Paris attacks in 2015. Neither of those were perpetuated by stalkers. Nether of those were perpetuated by members of the concert-going crowd. None of the attackers in either case were in a place where facial recognition of the crowd would have either seen them or even identified them as a threat. The idea that using this technology makes the concert-goers any safer is ludicrous.
That said, a public figure using facial recognition on audiences for their security detail to keep track of known potential threats does not strike me as a bad idea. It's just not nearly as salacious a story and wouldn't garner nearly as much attention.
tl;dr - This specific usage of facial recognition technology isn't terribly controversial. The conclusions drawn by the article are, but that was probably the point.
... That's not quite how expertise works in applied sciences. If someone tells you that plugging a USB stick into a computer that is behind a firewall is safe, you might have heard that it's unsafe, but since it's a testable action you can *know* it's not safe. Somewhere down the line, someone (a lot of people, usually) actually did the thing they purport to have expertise on. For complex topics you would defer to other experts in the field, but for basic wide-ranging policies you should really be utilizing broad knowledge of the subject instead of specifics.
Plus, having three people advise you isn't much better than one. If two are frauds and one is competent you still get bad advice without having any idea what good advice would even sound like. That's sometimes acceptable for concerns tertiary to your goals, but not for advice on setting and achieving the primary goals themselves.
You're right. Having an "expert" is much worse than having an expert. Then again, with absolutely no background knowledge, how does he know whether those he delegates to are "experts" or experts?
I mean, call me crazy, but even if you're not an expert shouldn't you at least have a fundamental understanding of how the organization you are in charge of affects the world day to day?
Is it because these people *aren't* saving enough for retirement or is it because they *can't* save enough to retire? The difference lies in whether one assumes most of these people are finding meaning and satisfaction in their work or whether they are stuck in a cycle they hate and have no means to change or affect. The appropriate solution to deal with this shift very much depends on which of the two you think is happening.
Ironically, I feel like you can thank the phone plan carriers for this. There haven't been huge advantages to getting a new phone every year or two for a long, long time. But people did it because, as the summary states, the cost was subsidized by the carriers as bait to get people to switch networks and sign 2 year contracts. Since they stopped doing that and customers started seeing the high price tag attached to those phones they have been deciding that while the $100-$200 upgrade to the newest phone was something they could live with, $500 (or much more, depending on how new a model you want) is not.
Honestly, I feel like the rapid upgrade cycle we saw for several years was the strange behavior and what we're seeing now is just a return to normalcy.
Ok, I've seen this same argument too many times to keep quiet anymore. "Nobody is forcing you to work there" is a terrible litmus test for worker exploitation! There is truly no employer abuse that cannot be dismissed by saying "well, nobody is forcing you to work there."
Being harassed at work? Nobody is forcing you to work there.
Mandatory overtime without pay? Nobody is forcing you to work there.
Forced to promote the employer on your personal social media account or you're blacklisted? Nobody is forcing you to work there.
Constantly repeated workplace accidents due to safety hazards employer refuses to address? Nobody is forcing you to work there.
Required to publicly support your employer's political stance? Nobody is forcing you to work there.
You can't draw the line at literal slave labor and say anything less than that is perfectly fine!
people should demand the same rules
Should the rules for who can park in a business' parking lot be the same as the rules for all the roads that can be used to get to that business? Why not? Shouldn't we be using the same rules wherever cars can go?